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Not that this will help you resolve the problem at hand Leon, but you could try installing Acronis True Image or other backup software when you're back up and running. You can set it to run a backup of your C partition to another partition on a schedule.
Should the need arise, you can boot from the Acronis boot media to restore from your last good backup and you're all set once again.
Have a listen to the hard drive in question to see if it's making any unusual repetitive sounds like ticking sounds. If it is, you probably have a head that may be starting to tilt / bad sectors etc and it's time to swap the drive out. Usually no good can come of retaining a PC hard drive that's doing re-reads.
If you have critical files on that drive and have decided to swap it out, don't spin it up again until you're ready to copy your files from it. Usually bad drives get worse with time.
Good luck with your repair. If you decide to do a re-install of XP, it might be worth telling the installer to format the drive NTFS (not a Quick format - which only re-writes the table of contents etc but doesn't touch every sector). This way, you'll find out if there are any bad sectors as the format progresses. If there are bad / unreadable sectors, the format probably won't finish, and it's time to grab a new drive or perhaps perform some percussion maintenance on the old drive.
Dean
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